'How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque Art': Medieval, Modern and Postmodern in Meyer Schapiro

Abstract

Critics of modern culture, for a hundred years already, have contrasted the place of art in our own society with its role in the Middle Ages. In the latter they suppose, it was an essential part of social life, while today art is a 'mere ornament', without utility or high spiritual ends. This judgement of the inorganic character of modern art, rests on a narrow, simplified conception of the nature of art and of how art functions today. Lacking sympathy for modern art, these critics can hardly be expected to serve as guides to its qualities and aims. One could easily show that contemporary art, though unreligious and precisely because unreligious is bound up with modern experiences and ideals no less actively than the old art with the life of its time. This does not mean that if you admire modern works, you must accept modern social institutions as good much of the best art of our day is, on the contrary, strongly critical of contemporary life; in the same way, admiration of medieval art does not require that we accept feudalism as an ideal human order or the legends and dogmas represented in the church sculptures as true beliefs. What concerns us here, however, is not the defence of modern art, but rather the inquiry into the common view that medieval art was strictly religious and symbolical, submitted to collective aims, and wholly free from the aestheticism and individualism of our age. I shall try to show that by the eleventh and twelfth centuries there had emerged in western Europe within church art a new sphere of artistic creation without religious content and imbued with values of spontaneity, individual fantasy, delight in color and movement, and the expression of feeling that anticipate modern art. (Meyer Schapiro, 'On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art' (1947))